Writing to his friend and confidant Colin Taylor of the recently published Whenas the rye reach to the chin, Warlock remarked, "Don't let that song get too popular, for I have done a much better setting of the same delightful poem—this is altogether fresher and nearer the spirit of the words." Prone to dismiss his productions as "rubbish," "drivel," "potboilers," and the like, this is one of the composer's few enthusiastic responses to his own work, and one with which the listener acquainted with both may well disagree. The later, 1922, setting, titled Chopcherry, published as No. 1 of the first set of Peterisms (with A Sad Song and Rutterkin)—especially in the version with string quartet made the same year—mutes the ecstatic, exclamatory rush of the initial 1918 setting with a sentimental flutter that places it very close in ambience to Candlelight: A Cycle of Nursery Jingles composed the following year. Among Candlelight's dozen miniatures, several evoke the world of childhood with exquisite charm, while others skirt the maudlin, and not always successfully. The overall effect is, therefore, equivocal, a response Chopcherry may provoke. One's ambivalence originates with the composer, who seems never to have to come to terms with it. Cecil Gray, his boon companion and first biographer, quoted "a little fragment scribbled on a piece of paper which was found among his things..." after his suicide in 1930, aged 36—"When I see, and smell, a crowd of Battersea children swarming round the door of Stephenson's bakery, I am minded with disgust of a swarm of obscene flies hovering over a clot of dung in the roadway. But when I turn away there sweeps over me the unspeakable poignancy of the Good Shepherd and His Lambs." During the period when Chopcherry and Candlelight were composed, Warlock—after losing editorship of The Sackbut—returned to Cefn Bryntalch, the family estate in Wales, where his mother cared for his putative son, Nigel Heseltine, whose own account of the matter, Capriol for Mother: A Memoir of Philip Heseltine (London: Thames Publishing, 1992), raises more questions than it answers. The story of living in the same house and dining daily with the remote stranger he claimed as father accords chillingly with other oddments of the Warlock biography. The little boy largely ignored by Philip Heseltine and never acknowledged as kin casts into lurid relief the obsessive evocations of childhood that are such an affecting—and ambiguous—strand of the Warlock oeuvre.

© Adrian Corleonis, Rovi